King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

J. Edgar Hoover was always sensitive to criticism. When the FBI director heard about King’s comments, he asked Berl I. Bernhard, staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to talk to King and explain that not all the agents in the South were southerners. King didn’t buy it. “I still think the Bureau’s in bed with all of the southern police chiefs, and we’re not getting adequate investigations,” King told Bernhard. High-ranking FBI officials decided that the bureau’s assistant director, Cartha Dekle “Deke” DeLoach, should contact King and arrange a meeting to discuss the minister’s complaints. DeLoach phoned King twice on November 30. He left two messages, but he said that King didn’t return his calls. “It would appear obvious,” DeLoach wrote in a memo, “that Rev. King does not desire to be told the true facts. He obviously used deceit, lies and treachery as propaganda to further his own causes.” In another memo, Hoover called King’s failure to return the calls “an instance of his insincerity,” and added that “no further attempts are being undertaken by this Bureau to contact him.”